1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to clustered data processing systems and in particular to management and utilization of shared storage within a clustered data processing system. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to an improved method and system for interfacing a Virtual Input/Output (I/O) Servers (VIOS) with a Virtual Control Panel (VCP) to facilitate partition hibernation and remote restarting.
2. Description of the Related Art
Large scale, distributed data processing systems are known in the art. As cloud computing becomes more and more ubiquitous in the computer world, methods for providing enhanced functionality and greater up-time are required to continue to adequately serve commercial needs.
Today, storage virtualization and management is a separate entity than server virtualization and management. Different clients logical partitions (LPARs) associated with different servers access the same SAN storage. A client's LPARs on one server may not know if the SAN disk that it is trying to access is being used by some another client's LPAR belonging to some other server. This can cause data integrity issues and may potentially cause data corruption and client partition crashes. This problem is exacerbated for memory sharing and remote hibernation solutions. With client hibernation in distributed environments, the hibernation file is stored to the client's assigned storage, which is only accessible from that client LPAR, and the client can then be restored on the same client LPAR from which the client was hibernated. When a client LPAR crashes or is not available on the local device/terminal at which the user is located, restoring the client from its hibernation state is often not possible and the client has to be restarted/rebooted/reinstalled utilizing the client's OS image. When the client has to be completely re-installed at a new location within the distributed system in order to access the client applications, this re-installation process can be an immensely time consuming and arduous task for a client (or a systems administrator) and also requires an amount of foresight that is not always possible (particularly when the original terminal is unavailable due to hardware failure).